The 2019 calendar year has been one for the record books. Wet, cold, late, hot, wet again.
The year was so far from normal that it may be of little interest to try to try to breed crops to deal with this type of extreme. One farmer told me he needs to plant corn that knows how to swim.
From a serious perspective, what can we take from years that are far outside the normal rainfall we have come to expect?
I spoke with Mike Steenhoek, executive director of the Soy Transportation Coalition, at the recent National Farm Broadcasters Convention. He says we should redefine 100 year floods since they seem to come every two years. Also, to prepare for extremes rather than just react to them.
AUDIO: Mike Steenhoek, Soy Transportation Coalition
AUDIO: Profit Matters 12-10-19
Ken Root: This year has been a high watermark for rivers we’ve been dealing with and although you can do a lot about that, I wonder if you have some reaction to what has happened? We have the Missouri River has flooded a lot of land, has been high. You cannot run barges on it. I was talking to a farmer from Missouri and he is now referring to a state as “misery” because of how much difficulty they have had. What damage has this done? Or is this something we just have to accept – That this high water really has impeded our transportation?
Mike Steenhoek: What has been unique is how elongated and geographically extended this has been. We’re hardy in agriculture and in the Midwest, so we are accustomed to flooding events. That’s what’s been unique this year, is that it hasn’t been just an isolated event. It’s been elongated and dispersed throughout the country.
I think what wise people would do is you start looking at what have we been experiencing? Not just this year, but for a number of years. When you start having 500-year floods or whatever the exorbitant number is, a 100-year flood every two to three years, then you start saying maybe we shouldn’t be calling them a 100-year floods anymore. If that’s becoming more of the expectation, then you need to position assets and muster resources in a different way.
Maybe we should look at some of these things less as emergencies and more as something we need to anticipate. When you do that, you’re able to better react to them instead of all of a sudden you have an emergency. We’ve got a muster, all of these resources to attend to it. But if you’ve already positioned it ahead of time, you can mollify the impacts of it. There’s not a whole lot we can do about Mother Nature, but there’s a whole lot we can do about how we prepare for it. We need to do a better job of preparing for these things and realizing, whatever the culprit is for these weather events, they’re becoming more and more frequent.
